The present invention relates to an optical disc recording/reproducing device and its operation method. More particularly, it relates to technologies effective to record/reproduce plural optical discs.
In enterprises, government and municipal offices, SOHO (Small Office/Home Office), individuals, etc., there exists a general tendency that the information amount of electronic data to be processed is becoming larger and larger. In accompaniment with this trend, a medium for storing the larger volume of information is becoming absolutely necessary. Meanwhile, people also tend to hang up “Green IT (Information Technology)” as keyword and introduce a lower-power-consumption appliance for the earth's environment protection. In a situation like this, attention has been focused on an optical disc as the above medium for storing the larger volume of information. This is because the optical disc hardly necessitates the power for storing information, and because the technological developments (the representative of which is BD (Blu-ray Disc)) for implementing even larger capacity are being made energetically.
Also, inventions have been made in order to solve problems of an optical-disc library device where plural these optical discs are used, and of an archive device whose main object is to backup electronic data.
For example, JP-A-6-274995 describes as follows (Summary of the Invention):
“Individual pieces of information about the defect management areas of individual optical discs 1 of plural optical disc cartridges 12B to 12G stored in a storage section 13 of the optical-disc library device are collected, and the individual pieces of information collected in this way are written in advance into the optical disc 1 of an optical disc cartridge 12A. Then, if a command of seeking an optical disc cartridge out of the optical disc cartridges 12B to 12G is issued, the information about the defect management area of the optical disc of the sought optical disc cartridge is read from the optical disc of the optical disc cartridge 12A. This reading operation makes it unnecessary to read the information about the defect management area of the sought optical disc at the time of initializing the optical disc. This makes it possible to shortening the initializing time.”